Stop the undead!

Once upon a time, there was a skill called bellow. Bellow liked to do damage in the ballpark of 200-350 damage after a two-man set up. A few local kids cried because they couldn't use it and it killed them. A fat little cherub descended on a fluffy cloud and waved his nerf wand in the direction of the vile skill. Since then, bellow hasn't been seen or heard from again.

Fast forward a few years...the mayan apocalypse has come and gone and has disturbed the dark energies of cut and paste (despite claims to the contrary). The tumult of the calendar reset has resurrected bellow and it's back and it's angry. It's so angry in fact, that it got a name change. Bellow was far to classy for this beast. It is now known as.....BRRRRRRRRAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNMMMMMMMMEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLTTTTTTTTT. (Brainmelt).

Two people can set another player up for a bello.....brainmelt that can hit for damage between 200-600 damage. (That's two bellows, for those kids at the back of the class). Yep. Two people. Same as bellow. Twice the damage of bellow. It's been running around in the wild now for a while there, chums.

Additional thoughts: Trigger is a good idea. (Even though someone said it was excessive back in the saboteur beta). Being able to trigger off of stupidity, thereby forcing someone to pk while deliberately not curing stupidity (or impatience) is a bad idea. Slow your roll. Limit the triggerable affliction list.

Hallucinogen: Good idea. I like it. Want to remove "random direction walking" from stupidity so I don't proc it in the stupidity I don't want to cure because it could kill me?

Comments

Invoke could do to be tweaked heavily. Possibly remade to suit a new purpose, since it is honestly only has use in an odd instagib situation. Brainmelt needs to see some revisions. Namely, it could do with not being affected by sensitivity.. and we might need to remove toxic mental afflictions from the Supremacy list.

Bellow was changed not to nerf it, but because Linslet and I wanted to see it become useful for Defiler in 1v1. Your memory on the nature of why the skill was changed is quite selective - at the time, we merely viewed it as 2birds1stone.

Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a rightass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."

Yeah, but you have to admit @Sarrius, that people were crying just as loud about bellow as they currently are about brainmelt(which does more damge), and it got hit with the nerf stick pretty fast(Once people actually started using the profession in combat). In relation bellow, brainmelt probably has a little bit more flavor of the month time left before its tweaked. Just because you advocated it for 1v1's doesn't mean everyone was.

Bellow also had the ridiculously easy setup of "have sensitivity", which was an amazingly meaningless restriction in the era of the cryknight. It was nerfed because it was basically a non-physical version of bcry/bbt, (which had been nerfed largely due to complaints from demonic, I might add). It was easily spammable on every single balance without any kind of setup or waiting period, and the "two man setup" he's talking about is "one knight uses battlecry".

Brainmelt is a different beast entirely. The setup isn't oxa/strych/bcry, which is sensitivity and a stun with a 50% uptime and which is rolled continuously regardless of who else is in the fight, or a powerful disable like pindown/bbt. It's longer and more involved, and it's easily interruptible, and it has to be redone against every target, as opposed to the "linear trigger off of battlecry" that bellow could get away with. They're completely different skills.

I'm not saying that Brainmelt is perfect, or that it couldn't use a tweak. Comparing it to bellow, though, is disingenuous and misleading, because the skills are not at all alike.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

Funny that it's brainmelt being complained about-- I really thought it'd be rupture being complained about. It's honestly quite a bit faster for two competent Hunters to set up and kill with. Either way, though.

At the moment, we can see that Hunter was built completely around 1v1. How the profession's abilities factor into team combat was never really looked into upon its inception, and there's a major 'whoopsies' moment now because it is honestly way too powerful.

@khizan: That's actually fairly false(in team combat). During a shardfall, all I needed to do was watch when knights attacked, and the moment I saw a couple of hits go through, hit my strych/brainmelt button, and I would often receive a kill due to how the damage scaled. Because the standard toxin sets of most people lined up pretty damn well with brainmelt afflictions, it would mean throwing out 400+ damage hits(scaled to the person's max health, even) after every round of attacks.

@ahkan: Trigger's list of useful cureable afflictions is actually fairly short. I've mentioned it before(I think, I'm not terribly lucid after New Year's LANning), but trigger is powerful until it's over, giving the Hunter a 30 second kill window. The proper response to fighting Hunters(and I'm shafting myself by saying this) is to prioritize certain herbs first, and know what they're going to be triggering off of. If you cure with basic autocuring and don't worry about anything, Hunter will mess you up hard. If you put some basic prioritizing in and play it smart with watching for when triggers hit, you'll have the Hunter constantly resetting and have constant 20-30 second windows where they're just resetting their offence.

@sarrius: I like the idea behind hallucinogen, but I agree that invoke and sensitivity needing a change. I did some testing earlier, and if sensitivity were completely removed, then a non-statuette hunter would find it nearly impossible to pull off a kill against anyone above 500 health, if they're working curing properly. I would like to note I run tests both against standard autocuring and people who have tweaked to cure against Hunter properly. Invoke should be reworked into another skill that allows momentum to run on a bit longer, I think, instead of offering even more massive burst affliction.

So, yes, brainmelt and rupture at the moment are incredibly powerful in team combat. Too much so. The problem we run into, however-- How do we balance this for team combat while making it still effective in 1v1?

Foreword: I know a couple of you think brainmelt is too powerful 1v1 too, but really, it's not. Also, quit shielding after a failed brainmelt, the EQ balance is so long that I'm not going to be able to keep that damage momentum, you may as well use that time to do whatever you want.

A big factor in brainmelts, team or not, would be the comboable strychnine/brainmelt. It allows for an instantaneous sensitivity upon brainmelt, which counts as both an affliction and amping damage. While the first one isn't so much of an issue, amplifying damage is. Hunter does suffer a little in the way that applying oxalis really sort of has to be done somewhere in the middle of your triggers, so you're theoretically losing out on an affliction there, but it doesn't compensate for the extra hundred some damage strychnine instantly applies.

Throwing the nerf bat and simply removing strychnine or making brainmelt un-comboable would more or less break the delicate balance Hunter currently stands at. For the average user, and even the more adept user, it's always walking a fine line between pulling off the kill or missing it with a big move that gets cured if you miss. This is good. This is where a lot of professions stand at.

Many problems can be fixed by making it so strychnine can not be used on the claw(This toxin is too slick for your claws), and making it so stupidity only counts if afflicted by deaden. Similarly, a sting with paralysis with the same parameters could be added in order to retain functionality in 1v1 but to reduce its power in team combat.

Brainmelt's 1v1 functionality, when sensitivity is removed, can be changed by changing invoke around. A simple solution that my sleep deprived brain has come up with is that instead of invoking a pre-determined ability, it's simply invoking a single affliction after preparation(similar to preparing actions for basilisk). It allows for a slight momentum increase and duration without being horribly massive. This ability would make it so that after it's used, there's a five second cooldown before you can use brainmelt, with maybe a fairly limited list of afflictions that are possible(paralysis, stupidity, sensitivity, hallucinations, impatience not included, for instance), making it a skill designed to build momentum without becoming a massively crippling affliction stack.

Brainmelt could maybe use a few tweaks to slow it down a bit, but it's honestly not that bad when compared to the synergies available on AM and Demonic.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

Having seen some logs, I am not entirely convinced that brainmelt needs any bigger changes at all, but as the main synergy comes from flared runes, what would be the opinions about giving the flared runes a dampening effect on brainmelt? Each rune flared on the target (including runes whose cooldown is still running) would reduce the effective affliction count on the target by 1. That should resolve the issue without affecting 1v1 fights at all.

I dislike that change primarily because it gives runeguards an awesome new class feature, and then it penalizes their team when they use it in a teamfight. I also dislike it because too many hits to brainmelt will keep hunters more effective just using iceblast/lash or relying on long affliction chains in the chaos of team combat.

I think a better approach might be hitting Loshre and Nairat as flared runes and seeing how things go from there. Both are problematic as they make it way too easy to stick certain afflictions while, imo, failing to provide enough affliction edge to make the sabre-runeguard truly viable as an afflictor. For runeguards, they basically exist to enable hunters to easily land monstrous brainmelts.

The other main problems I see with brainmelt stem mainly from people playing poorly and failing to take proper precautions.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

I dislike that change primarily because it gives runeguards an awesome new class feature, and then it penalizes their team when they use it in a teamfight. I also dislike it because too many hits to brainmelt will keep hunters more effective just using iceblast/lash or relying on long affliction chains in the chaos of team combat.

Sensitivity needs to not crank damage for Brainmelt. That is a good first step.

Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a rightass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."

Sensitivity ups the damage of everything that does damage. If you think brainmelt should be unaffected by sensitivity, I'd like to see your classleads to make it also stop affecting BBT, crescentcut, overwhelmed sdrops, and every other burst damage finishing move in the game, please.

I could see removing it from Supremacy so it doesn't doubletap the damage boost, but nerfing the primary effect of sensitivity is kneejerk overkill.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

Classes with abilites that synergize well shouldn't be allowed! It's not fair that two people combining their skillsets is superior to one person acting alone! Everyone should be perfectly equal and anyone who has an advantage over someone else should be nerfed into uselessness!